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US Educational Scores Not So Abysmal
DavidHumus writes "The much-publicized international rankings of student test scores — PISA — rank the U.S. lower than it ought to be for two reasons: a sampling bias that includes a higher proportion of lower socio-economic classes from the U.S. than are in the general population and a higher proportion of of U.S. students than non-U.S. who are in the lower socio-economic classes. If one were to rank comparable classes between the U.S. and the rest of the world, U.S. scores would rise to 4th from 14th in reading (PDF) and to 10th from 25th in math."
FA says "Based on their analysis, the co-authors found that average U.S. scores in reading and math on the PISA are low partly because a disproportionately greater share of U.S. students comes from disadvantaged social class groups, whose performance is relatively low in every country."
Hmm, is the study arguing then that these students should be excluded? If so, what is the basis? Are they not really in the country?
Or are they sidestepping the issue of the massive difference in standards of living in the United States?
Granted, the source material may have handled this better than the summary article...
FA says: "As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations"
And the point is???
It's complicated. We're better off than countries where members of lower socioeconomic classes don't go to school. But our overall scores are lower than countries with better economic equality, because so many more of our citizens are in lower socioeconomic classes.
Uhh . . . wait a second!!1
How could U.S. scores rise to 4th from 14th, when four is less than 14??? They mean "lower"!
(Goes back to reading Texas high school math book)
It's complicated. We're better off than countries where members of lower socioeconomic classes don't go to school. But our overall scores are lower than countries with better economic equality, because so many more of our citizens are in lower socioeconomic classes.
It's simple. The scoring was done by American high school students. Obviously if it was corrected, things would be different =D
Unfortunately it's easier to come up with scapegoats than address real problems.
For example, see how many people will blame Teacher's Unions or the Federal Department of Education rather than question how much emphasis the local school board puts on Football stadiums.
Short version is we're intentionally turning the USA into a 3rd world country including achievement, but forcing school attendance like a 1st world country.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So if we factor out the poorer-performing students, America scores better?
That is amazing!
Ken
And there's the key. Our scores ARE abysmal, it's just that much of the blame goes to our failure to address the socio-economic divide rather than to our educational system.
14th to 4th? That's like 10 times better!
rewriting history since 2109
There's two problems with this argument: the facts are wrong, and it's totally misinterpreting the original article.
First the facts. Some foreign countries (ie: Germany) have a system similar to the one you describe. Many others don't. Finland, for example, is the only country besides us actually mentioned in this article. They don't have a two-track education system until the age of 16, which is not that far off from when the US Community College vs. Real University distinction sets in. The tests they're talking about actually happen at age 13, so you are simply wrong.
Second the original article's point is that the students tested are poorer then the student body as a whole. They're saying that while only 23% of American students go to schools where most kids are in poverty (e: qualify for cheap school lunches), 40% of American kids tested go to such schools. Our poorest kids take the damn test at twice the rates of everyone else, which isn't good for scores.
It depends on which American high school you're talking about.
I've been to some high schools that are packed full of high achievers and I've been to some high schools where each and every students have to gone through a metal detector before they are allowed to enter the school compound
There's just no justice to do any comparison between the two because their differences are so great they are much more like school systems from two very different countries
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And yet even with a "massive waste of human talent" the US leads the world in innovation, scientific achievement, per capita GDP (at least compared to countries that matter), military power (even in comparison to pretty much the rest of the world put together) etc etc. Why are there no European Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. Do you realize that huge majority of the largest and best companies in the world are US based? Do you realize that 70 of the top 100 universities according to Times Education rankings are in the US? Just imagine what we could do if we didn't have that "massive waste of human talent".
Or perhaps the answer is that relative economic liberty that enables economic growth and innovation cannot be separated from inequality. You can choose one or the other.
Europe is rotten economically and politically to the point where a new wave of dictatorships and wars (a regular occurrence in that part of the world) is not unthinkable anymore and the reason for that is not unrelated to sacrificing liberty for the sake of equality i.e. sacrificing some people for the sake of others.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
That's not quite right. Higher economic status is correlated to higher scores. This is true everywhere. The article has two claims related to this:
1. The US was badly sampled. It should be the case that a student in any economic group has the same probability of being included in the sample. However the sample they took has a disproportionately large number of students in lower economic groups. As an example, students attending schools with half of more of their students in poverty represent 23% of the total population of US students but 40% of the population of the test sample. Due to the correlation mentioned above, this lowers the measures scores of US students.
2. A higher proportion of US students are in lower economic groups than in other countries.
The first is clearly a methodology fault, and given the big difference in the example group of 40% vs 23% it could have large effects. The article doesn't discuss the details of the second group. It could be that the socio-economic divide is larger in which case it would be justified to say that still represents the country fairly and doesn't invalidate the comparison. Or it could be that children in lower economic groups are more likely to be students in the US than elsewhere. In that case it would seem perverse to claim the US educational system is worse than others because it attempts to educate poor kids. It could be both of these things or something else.
Yes, exactly. That's even shorter than my short version! :)
Short but wrong, because both versions assume the problem is getting worse. Test scores are going up world-wide, and have been for decades. But they are going up even faster in America.
White kids in America do as well as white kids in Europe. Black kids in America do as well as black kids in Europe. But America has more black kids (and poor hispanic kids too). This explains ALL of the difference in test scores. We need to do better, but we should not be looking to Europe as a model, because, for similar demographics, they do no better than we do.
American's can't even spell colour properly. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
White kids in America do as well as white kids in Europe. Black kids in America do as well as black kids in Europe.
The article doesn't break it down by race, but by class. What they say in the article:
But the highest social class students in United States do worse than their peers in other nations, and this gap widened from 2000 to 2009 on the PISA.
So we've got more lower class, and our upper class is worse. We have relatively uneducated children.
well from my own person experience from 2002-14 yrs ago. What screwed me up was when they did the alternate track for math and i was put with the 'slow' kids.
If you think that 2002 was "14 yrs ago", then maybe they made the right call when they put you in the "slow" math class.
It saddens me to see such a post get moded 5 "informative," while being so wrong. It shows how ill-informed about education we are on Slashdot.
We white guys tend to think of black and Hispanic cultures as uninterested in education. This is simply not the case, at least not in Chapel Hill, NC, where I live. The truth is that kids who don't get enough to eat and who don't know if their dad will pay the rent this month have much bigger problems to worry about than spelling and math. I visited our local black and Hispanic communities, and found that those where home ownership was high had good test scores. Neighborhoods of shabby rentals where the kids are underfed do poorly. I also found that very poor white families did almost as bad as poor black and Hispanic families. In Chapel Hill, 90% of the achievement gap is explainable by the gap in severe poverty.
A few years ago my neighborhood was redistricted in a way that the school my kids were zoned to could not succeed. Some a-hole in Southern Village "won" the redistricting contest, and while the rest of the district was rezoned mostly wisely, this guy booted most of the blacks and half of the Hispanics out of his daughter's school and concentrated poverty in another one. He threw our upscale neighborhood (not in Southern Village) into the school just to make it look a little better on paper. That's when I decided to check out what was really going on in these schools. By the way, the school is shutting down now, due to poor performance.
Carrboro, where our school is, has some desperately poor areas. The illegal immigrant population is so poor, many of their kids don't get enough to eat. Also, there's old mostly black mill town neighborhoods that are owned by slum lords. I talked to several black families there to get a feel for what they were looking for in a school, and what they felt were the challenges, because at the redistricting meetings, not one parent from any poor neighborhood showed up. I tried and failed to talk to any Hispanic family. When I knocked on their doors, all the Spanish language radio stations were silenced, lights turned off, kids were quieted, and the door was not answered. I assume this is what they have to do to avoid ICE.
On the other hand, in lower-middle class neighborhoods in north Chapel Hill where ownership is high, black and Hispanic kids do very well, almost as well as the white kids, even though they are poorer on average. It seems that once you have a place to live, enough food, and maybe a car, then regardless of cultural and racial background, the next priority is educating your kids.
I keep hearing from liberal friends that we need to spend more on education to give the next generation of black and Hispanic families an equal chance. I hear from conservative friends that spending more money wont help, because the school system is fundamentally screwed up, and because black and Hispanic families fail because they don't try and don't care - it's their fault. Both sides are wrong. The problem isn't that schools are underfunded or teachers aren't good enough, nor is the problem that black and Hispanic parents don't care about educating their kids. The problem is severe poverty. What we need to do is dramatically reduce poverty. We can do this, but as a nation we've decided that it's OK for blacks and Hispanics to be poor. Just like in our days of slavery, we see poor blacks suffering, and do nothing about it. We haven't lifted a finger to help them get ahead, and probably did a lot to hold them down. We're generous with tax dollars when it comes to building jails to lock up them up, and ICE has plenty of funding to deport Hispanics, but we don't do a damned thing to help these people find a way out of poverty. We're OK with blacks commiting crimes in poor black neighborhoods, and we're OK with illegal imigrants picking all our strawberries for us. In short, we do poorly in education because we're still racist. It's not overt racism like before, but whites in the US are OK
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The article doesn't break it down by race, but by class.
TFA does not break it down by race, but it is broken down by race in plenty of other places. Blacks do about one standard deviation worse than whites. If you correct for socio-economic status, some, but not all, of the disparity will go away. But blacks do worse even when compared with white classmates of the same family income.
So we've got more lower class, and our upper class is worse. We have relatively uneducated children.
This is because the USA has more racial minorities in all socio-economic groups. When you break it down by demographic group (both race and income), America does just as well as other countries.
Of course, we should not consider any of this as justification for complacency. Race is not destiny, and blacks today do better than whites did a few generations ago. But we need to make sure we learn the right lessons. Looking at other countries as examples of the "right" way to educate children is misguided, because they actually do no better than us.
Not really, for example in Germany they have a rigidly tiered system where kids are divided by potential between the 4th and 6th year of primary school. Children of lower socioeconomic status are almost always excluded from the college prep track due to a host of issues, but dominated by a lack of free time on the part of the parents in the preschool years (the same is true in the US which is one of the things the headstart program was aimed at remedying).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not really, socioeconomic mobility in the US is largely a myth we tell people to keep them working hard.
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.[13] Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. link
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I agree with just about everything you say besides this: "Both sides are wrong." The left isn't as single note as you're putting them here - there's a pretty widespread understanding that poverty is the root cause of inequity, and that education is just one of many places that desperately need work.
If your friends genuinely just think it's an education problem, well, there's something screwy there - but we genuinely DO have deep inequity built into our education system, much of it coming out of the 80s and 90s, much of it in the guise of "measurement" or "achievement-based funding."
But seriously - it's kind of just that sentence, and only in that it implies equal blame, when it's really more of an 80/20(but still benefiting from the results) kind of thing. The left has been a pretty useless ally, but the right is actually working hard every day to make it worse.
Your opinion of the parent poster is spot on, and, as someone who did a lot of subbing in Sarasota, Fl. (the most segregated city in the U.S., btw.) it's really, really true - poverty, much of which is directly the result of the insane racism we as a society still cling to, is the root cause of this shit.
Primary school is only an education if you're a pre-industrial farmer, secondary education is the bare minimum to really participate in the international economy and do better than living paycheck to paycheck. In much of Europe the lower class are locked out of effective secondary education at a young age, the US may do so de facto but the European model does it de jure, I think the US model has more chance of eventually fixing the problem than the European model.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think both theoretically and evidentally, this is not the case. If you are brought up with wealth, you have better nutrition, better education, more lucrative social networks, more useful free time, and a far less severe exposure to risk. If there is no government policy to redress this imbalance, then probability dictates that wealth concentrates and poverty, on the whole, becomes entrenched. And this is what we see in the modern US.
Individuals certainly have opportunities to make for themselves a better life. But if they are coming from a poor background, those opportunities are far fewer, they must work harder to take advantage of them, and the consequences of failure are much more severe. Essentially, the dice are loaded.
Moral considerations aside, a society where 80% of the population have the opportunity to take risks and be innovative and exploit usefully the extant infrastructure is going to be economically more successful than one in which only 20% do.